The Haiku alpha is barely out the door, and we already have another important news item about the open source reimplementation of the BeOS. About 18 months ago, Evgeny Abdraimov started porting the Qt4 graphical toolkit to Haiku, and now, we ave some seriously epic screenshots showing a multitude of Qt4 applications running in Haiku, as well as a developer preview release.

Sad day for Haiku. You're suposed to use the interface kit for Haiku/BeOS apps not [insert my favorite toolkit here]. If you're not satisfied with the interface kit, improve it. Using QT4 apps will make RAM requirement go up. And once a few QT4 apps are available no one will bother programming native ones. And soon we're back in the Linux rat's nest of stacking up software.

Well, what if we port gtk+, gnome, xfce, kde, lxde, xserver, mono, etcaetera to Haiku? Of course, we will one team who develops kernel, one team who develops feture x, one who develops y and one z. We will need some folks to make some distros, with slightly different kernel versions and patches, different desktops, different package managers and off we go.

"Stacking up software" isn't a bad thing. The problem with Linux is that the development of the various sub-systems isn't being coordinated, which is leading to a patchwork of imperfect integration and competition between multiple solutions to the same problem.

Sad day for Haiku. You're suposed to use the interface kit for Haiku/BeOS apps not [insert my favorite toolkit here]. If you're not satisfied with the interface kit, improve it. Using QT4 apps will make RAM requirement go up. And once a few QT4 apps are available no one will bother programming native ones.

That's just fear-mongering. You'll notice that Qt hasn't injured Mac OS X or Windows development, even tho it's available for those platforms. Apps that target Haiku will still be written using Haiku's native toolkits, in all likelyhood; all the availability of Qt is going to do is make it easy to make existing multiplatform apps that already use Qt available for Haiku, too. And make it easier for developers to move to Haiku. Neither of which are bad things.

one difference is that windows/mac api's are already well developed and qt just adds multi-platform to the mix. Haiku's api is very primitive compared to QT and people may use QT for those features rather than wait for a more robust haiku api.

[quote="boldingd"]
"Stacking up software" isn't a bad thing. The problem with Linux is that the development of the various sub-systems isn't being coordinated, which is leading to a patchwork of imperfect integration and competition between multiple solutions to the same problem.
[/quote]

The problems you mention are not the only ones, there's also the problem of there being too much OS portability cruft. For ex. if I use Linux, I want a desktop environment that is custom made for Linux, not one full of portability cruft, abstraction layers so it can run on every platform (that I don't care about) in existence. That's also part of the "stacking up software" problem.

[quote="boldingd"]
That's just fear-mongering. You'll notice that Qt hasn't injured Mac OS X or Windows development, even tho it's available for those platforms. Apps that target Haiku will still be written using Haiku's native toolkits, in all likelyhood; all the availability of Qt is going to do is make it easy to make existing multiplatform apps that already use Qt available for Haiku, too. And make it easier for developers to move to Haiku. Neither of which are bad things. [/quote]

The Linux desktop experience is totally *ruined* because of this, because of portability cruft, competing components, bad integration, incoherent mess etc... Also on Linux you have to learn "10,000" different styles of APIs to get something done as far as programming which is really substandard.